Why a team leader needs an email archive

January 30, 2015

Out of the box, mailboxes are designed to meet the needs of a single user’s needs. Users receive emails that only they can read. This is generally a good thing for security and privacy, but often a team leader, like a manager or department head, wants to use people’s mailboxes as a team resource.

Suppose a sales manager has a customer on the phone following up on an email sent by somebody that just went sick….

Suppose that same sales manager wants staff to have access to their emails to customers, but not their internal emails….

Suppose a customer service manager wants to read an entire email trail associated with a customer complaint….

Suppose a training manager wants to read the emails sent by a new employee to ensure their work is up to scratch….

Exchange can be configured to achieve some of these needs but as with rapid search, it’s going against the grain. Exchange was designed with a per mailbox security model in mind. You either can see a mailbox or you can’t.

If you have a sophisticated CRM system, it may support some or all of the above requirements. However, a CRM is major investment and it is difficult to configure to achieve it all. An email archive can be a great compliment to a well configured CRM and if you don’t have a business grade CRM, an email archive can be priceless to a team leader with:

Configurable search access across different users’ emails and archive stores.

Powerful rules that let you send emails to different stores based upon attributes like sender, recipient, internal/external, subject and so forth.

As well as augmenting your CRM, an email archive will store any automated emails that it delivers. Your automated systems may not store outgoing emails they send, but an email archiver will.